Destination marketing: Pop-up ‘Flanders street’ in Paris

Here is another great story about the creative marketing strategy for the travel industry! From 5th of July 2015, the Rue Androuet in the famous Montmartre district of Paris, France was renamed to Rue de la Flandre, giving Parisians and visitors the chance to sample the atmosphere of Flanders and Brussels in Paris.

This is a very creative and rather unique way of destination marketing and one has to applaud to the efforts of VisitFlanders to undertake such a bold move. It was certainly not easy to ‘take-over’ the whole street in the center of Paris; however, this proved to be a very successful initiative. The Flemish pop-up street in the heart of Paris aimed to promote tourism in Flanders and focused on 5 main themes: festivals, heritage, foods and drinks, design and cycling.

The shops in the street were filled with Flemish products including beer, shrimp croquettes, speculoos and cuberdons. Street also featured art galleries, cafés, a beer cave, and a chip shop called “Le Fritkot”. The whole event coincided with the start of the Tour de France in Antwerp, which also contributed to the reinforcement of a stronger image and branding of Flanders in France. This may look as a ‘massive undertaking’ for a tourism board, but astonishingly the whole project had cost VisitFlanders about 320.000 € (which is about 5 % of their annual budget). Certainly, this is worth of the investment, considering the fact that the French tourists account for 2 million overnight stays in Flanders annually and they are considered to be ‘big spenders’. They tend to spend 180 EUR on average per day, a lot more than, for example, Dutch visitors.

You may find more information about the Rue de la Flandre project from Toerisme Vlaanderen official website. Other interesting insights may be read on a French blog Burn me baby.